PRO features: multiple email accounts and rules

The Mail Attachment Downloader FREE versions offer the ability to download emails from only a single email account at a given time. Furthermore, you are restricted to only a single search or filter criteria.

We will explain how the Mail Attachment Downloader PRO versions differs and overcomes these limitations below with the PRO Features: multiple email accounts and rules.

Multiple email accounts

With the free version, you can run a download session for a single email account at a time. To download from another account you will need to pick another account from the Account dropdown.

With the PRO version, you can select multiple accounts by selecting <multiple@multiple> option from the Account or email pulldown as shown below.

This will bring up the multiple account chooser after which you can select multiple email accounts that have already been configured.

Note that prior to selecting these accounts, you will need to add these accounts to the Account list first as individual accounts and then select the <multiple@multiple> option to choose multiple accounts.

Once selected, when Connect and Download is clicked, the program will download emails from multiple emails automatically.

If you have the PRO Server version and you want to download from multiple email accounts in the background, just select <multiple@multiple> first and then go to the Service tab and then click the Install service button.

Multiple email rules

The FREE version only let you specify a single email rule per email account. For example, you could search for emails starting from a certain date (search tab) and also include a Filter (filter tab) by Subject. This will download all emails from that date that also match the Subject you provided.

This setting is saved per email account. When you switch accounts, you can specify a different search and filter setting that will be remembered for that account.

But what happens when you want to download this Subject to a folder and maybe a completely different email with a different Subject to a different folder and perhaps also run some actions after downloading the file?

You can do so with the Global Filters tab in the PRO versions as shown in the screenshot below. The global filters tab let you add many different rules as will be explained and they can either apply to all email accounts or be filtered down to apply to only a single email account.

When using global filters, certain settings in the Search and Filters tab that were set for individual accounts will no longer be used and the UI for these will be disabled.

This is because the Global filters take precedence over the individual settings specified. You can specify the same exact Search or Filter criteria via a global rule as will be shown below.

To replicate the search and filter settings that you had in your free version in the PRO version, the first step is to click Add new filter and enter a rule name for the new filter. Below we’ve entered then name as ‘Payments FY 2016 Q3’ as an example.

To add the Subject filter (that was previously in the Filters tab), click the Add button below the filter name in the Rule filters and extractions section and click on the Filters sub-menu followed by the Email Subject sub-menu item.

This will add a new Subject filter to the Filters list as highlighted below. You can then enter the Subject you want to search much like you could have with the Filters tab in the main program window. Click on the Subject text box or click the … button next to get a help on how to specify this filter.

Similarly, you could add other filters like by File type filter.

Click on the Filter file types list item in the list box below the Add button to reveal the file types you want to select. Example below shows how we can filter by file type of Documents. You can add your own in the Other section (comma separated, like .csv, .jpg etc.).

Extractions

Similarly, you could also extract data from any email header or body or attachment once the subject and file type matches if you would like as shown below.

Choose save filename or format

Once you have the filters and extractions setup, you can pick the filename format as shown below. Click on the little information button next to the filename format to see a list of templates (enclosed between { and }) to include in the filename. Note: You can also include a \ to indicate that a folder needs to be created. The program would automatically create a folder. For example, {EMAIL_FROM}\{FILENAME}_{ID}{EXT} would create a folder for every senders emails address. This will be automatically created when a new attachment is downloaded.

Also, to download the body, click the ‘Save as .eml‘ checkbox.

Download actions

Next we can add download actions that are run after the attachment is saved.

Lets suppose that the document attached in the email was .docx and we want to covert it to a .pdf. This is possible by choosing Add action in the Actions after save section and then clicking on Document conversion menu item as shown below.

Then we have added the document conversion action and you can add a new conversion by clicking on Add conversion button. Once complete, you will see something like the below indicating that Any doc is now converted to a pdf.

Save the rule

Now click on the Save button. That’s it, you have created your first rule.

If you want this rule to only apply to a certain email account and not all accounts, you can specify a filter as we did with the Subject instead choose Account filter as explained here.

Create unlimited number of rules and actions

Similarly, you can create any number of email rules with different save locations and different actions.

This provides rich automation capabilities with ease and enables you to automate backend email to perform more complex tasks.

Summary

This quick post shows how you can add many email accounts and many filters to handle simple automation tasks.

To see the fulllist of features or download actions the program supports check our PRO page and browse through features described there.